Downhill skiers know the dangers of racing for two minutes on sheer angles at up to 90mph, but what happened on the Birds of Prey run in Beaver Creek, Colorado, in November last year chilled everyone. Aksel Lund Svindal, the overall World Cup champion from Norway, who had just regained the lead in the rankings for this season, lost control on the bottom of the course. He crashed and could have bled to death in the ice after he was speared by one of his skis. It cut through his groin and he needed five hours of surgery.

Antoine Deneriaz, the downhill Olympic champion from France, pulled out of the competition and a week later retired from the sport. “I’ve lost confidence and I prefer to quit of my own doing rather than finish in hospital,” the 31-year-old said.

Finlay Mickel’s season has also been full of doubts. Britain’s best downhill skier since Martin Bell and the lone male hope on the World Cup circuit, Mickel fractured an ankle bone in Beaver Creek and wrote off most of this season. Low on confidence after coming back too early, according to Mark Tilston, Great Britain’s head ski coach, Mickel withdrew after the training runs from the intimidating course in Kitzbühel, Austria, last month. His chance for redemption comes in Kvit-fjell, Norway, this weekend, but some feel that he may not return next year.

“Finlay’s got the most important two downhill races of his career on Friday and Saturday,” Nick Fellowes, the former British skier and the face of Channel 4’s World Cup Skiing, said. “He’s our Great White Olympic Hope, but he has to go for it because if he slips out of the top 50, he will have to decide whether he will try to work his way back or chuck the towel in.”

Mickel, 30, needs to finish in the top 25 in both races to qualify for the World Cup final in Bormio, Italy, in a fortnight. But Fellowes feels that even though downhill is not a young skier’s sport, Mickel is at a turning point. “The reality is if he crashes he could end up in a wheelchair and he’s got a wife and a baby and he’s under huge pressure – family pressure – to join the family business [property building],” Fellowes said. “There’s a dilemma for Finlay because he’s had the taste of being top ten and could be again, but he knows the risks.”

Tilston said: “It is a question I was asking last year when he wasn’t 100 per cent focused on his skiing. It [having a child] is a change in your priorities, but he seemed more focused this year than in the past.”

It has been a frustrating season for Tilston, who saw Mickel – getting over an ankle injury from May – injure it again in August during a kick-about. “I find it annoying; for years we banned football and we won’t play it again at camps,” Tilston said.

With delicate features and studious spectacles, Mickel, who relaxes by playing electric bagpipes on head-phones in his hotel room, is not everyone’s picture of a speed demon. But he raised hopes when he began challenging for top-ten places in 2005. He finished 2006 ranked No 23 in the world but had slipped to No 41 by 2007.

“It’s taking longer than I’d hoped to get back and with no World Cup points at this point in the season it’s an absolute disaster,” Mickel said. “If I didn’t have the belief I could get back there, I wouldn’t be doing it. But right now it seems a long way away. It’s getting the skiing under my belt and getting the confidence to take more risks. You have to take risks to be at the top of this sport.”

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